A cautionary tale

Yeah, so I like wearing heels. I like shoes. Give me a break. As a result, I usually click loudly when I walk across hard floors, such as those lining the halls of the building that I work in. As a general rule, academic scientists can be a bit uh... lets say "very casually dressed", so I'm generally the only person wearing such shoes.

(Actually, in the last incarnation of my PhD lab, our lab was located near the administrative offices, including that of my advisor, the big cheese. Two other friends who have real jobs -i.e. admin jobs- also wore groovy clicky shoes. My advisor got tired of listening to our shoes outside of his office and installed carpeting in the hallway. Hee.)

The other people I work with like to make jokes about my noisy shoes. One friend, who is a PI and thus has her own office (!) likes to feign surprise every time i walk into her office and say something like 'Oh! You really snuck up on me!'. Heh. However, yesterday one of my co-workers made a shoes-related assumption that almost ended in disaster.

I had told my lab mates that I was going to go heat up my lunch so that we could go eat. I walked my lunch and my clicky shoes down the hallway to the microwave and fired it up. Unbeknownst to them, I then walked down another hallway so that I could hit the restroom while my lunch heated up. One of the other postdocs in the lab heard clicking shoes coming down the hallway and, thinking it was me returning from the microwave, decided to sneak up on me and scare me. So she crouched down along the wall to hide, and was just about to jump out at the clicky-shoes person when she realized that it was not in fact me, it was some woman in a suit. Accompanied by the DIRECTOR OF OUR INSTITUTE. She quickly straightened up and said 'Oops. Sorry' and retreated to the lab.

This just goes to show you that clicky shoes does not necessarily = me.